Flashback: One man’s battle dealt a blow to a racist housing practice in Chicago — and inspired ‘A Raisin in the Sun'
The brick three-flat at 6140 Rhodes Ave. is no different from any other in Chicago — except for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that guaranteed its place in American history.
The Tribune reported the justices’ action laconically: three paragraphs under the headline “U.S. Court Kills A Ruling Barring Negro Residents.” The 1940 news brief didn’t even identify Carl Hansberry as the Black man whose neighbors tried to keep him and his family from living among them through a legal real estate tactic known as a restrictive covenant.
Yet suppose the Tribune had reported that one of Hansberry’s children was a 10-year-old named Lorraine. Could anyone have predicted that she would later distill the hatred and violence her family suffered into a play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” the first Broadway production written by a Black woman?
For its part, the Chicago Defender immediately alerted its largely Black readership to the significance of the Nov. 12, 1940, decision in Hansberry v. Lee.
Its front-page story proclaimed a turning point: “The iron band of restrictive covenants which has checked the eastward movement of the Race on Chicago’s South side was pierced at one point by a decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court Tuesday.”
An inside page was devoted to the text of the justices’ decision, a timeline of the dispute and a first-person account by Carl Hansberry.
Restrictive covenants were formal agreements by which neighbors pledged not to sell or rent homes to Black people and other minorities. Moreover, these pacts didn’t just apply to those who signed them. Courts had ruled that anyone who bought property in a community with covenants had to honor them, and their use proliferated across the country as Black people fled the Jim Crow South only to find that segregation had followed them to the North.
In 1900, Chicago had 30,000 Black residents. By 1934, it had 236,000, most living in the Black Belt, a long narrow corridor running south from the city’s center, and a smaller one running west from its center.
Their geography was fixed by covenants established not just by individual homeowners. Black people also were hemmed in by restrictive practices of banks and real estate companies supposedly out of fear for their investments.
The University of Chicago was reportedly a financial contributor to the Woodlawn Property Owners Association, which led the campaign for covenants in the neighborhood where Hansberry chose to live. Its Hyde Park campus was directly east of there.
To the Defender’s readers, Hansberry, a real estate broker, explained he knew perfectly well what he was getting into when he moved to Rhodes Avenue. He bought the three-flat for the “purpose of trying to have the theory of restrictive covenants once and for all abolished, or declared as against the public policy of the state and nation.”
He was what the Defender called “a real Race man” — someone deeply committed to the struggle for equal rights.
So, too, was his wife, Nannie, as Lorraine Hansberry noted in a 1964 letter to the editor of The New York Times. “I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our house all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”
Carl Hansberry founded Lake Street Bank, one of Chicago’s first Black-owned financial institutions, and was a successful real estate agent when he bought the Rhodes Avenue three-flat in 1937. The deal was done surreptitiously in anticipation of the neighborhood’s hostility to Black people.
When word got out, the Hansberry family was besieged by howling mobs. A brick someone threw “almost took the life of the then eight-year old signer of this letter,” Lorraine Hansberry wrote to the Times. “My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school.”
In June 1937, property owner Anna Lee and other neighbors filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court and got an injunction prohibiting Carl Hansberry from renting out the three-flat’s apartments. “I don’t go where I’m not wanted,” Judge Michael Feinberg said, explaining his verdict.
An appeals court upheld the judge’s decision, putting the Hansberrys under threat of being evicted. So they vacated their own home while Hansberry v. Lee was taken to the Illinois Supreme Court. Carl Hansberry spent a small personal fortune keeping the case alive.
So he was understandably jubilant when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 1940. “Fortunately the U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the Illinois court’s ruling which gives a ray of hope for the ultimate survival and maintenance of the democratic ideals,” he wrote in the Defender.
Actually, Hansberry didn’t get all he was hoping for. The three-flat was his, but the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t say that restrictive covenants were morally indefensible. Instead, the justices decided his case on procedural grounds.
For example, the court wrote: “It is a principle of general application in Anglo-American jurisprudence that one is not bound by a judgment in personam in a litigation in which he is not designated as a party or in which has not been made a party by service of process.”
The justices’ legalese drowned out the voices of Carl Hansberry and Anna Lee. Their hopes and fears were left unsaid. It was left to Lorraine Hansberry to speak for them.
Moving to New York, she wrote for Freedom, a progressive publication founded by celebrated singer and activist Paul Robeson.
Her husband, Robert Nemiroff, wrote a hit song, “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” and his royalties allowed her to work on a play. She took its title from a line in Langston Hughes’ poem “Montage of a Dream Deferred.”
The play’s characters, the Youngers, have incompatible dreams. Mama, the matriarch, is determined to get them out of a Black Belt tenement. So she rejects a community group’s cash offer to stop her family from moving into its all-white neighborhood, saying to a son eager to take the money:
“I come from five generations of people who was slaves and sharecroppers — but ain’t nobody in my family never let nobody pay ‘em no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth. We ain’t never been that — dead inside.”
“Raisin in the Sun,” starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, opened on Broadway to rave reviews in 1959. The Times compared Hansberry to Anton Chekhov, the celebrated Russian author: “You might, in fact, regard ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ as a Negro ‘The Cherry Orchard.’”
Sadly, Carl Hansberry didn’t get to see his daughter’s success or to savor the victory of the cause for which he fought. He died in 1946, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court declared, pure and simple, that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional.
Carl Hansberry had exiled himself to Mexico, fearing he’d fought in vain for the right to live in that three-flat on Rhodes Avenue, yet Chicago’s neighborhoods were still segregated. His daughter spoke to that tragedy in her letter to the Times.
“My father was typical of a generation of Negroes who believed that the ‘American way’ could successfully be made to work to democratize the United States. ... Fatuous people remark these days on our ‘bitterness.' Why, of course we are bitter,” Lorraine Hansberry wrote.
Black activists were saying, “We must now lie down in the streets, tie up traffic, do whatever we can — take to the hills with guns if necessary — and fight back.”
For readers wanting to know where that might lead, she cited lines from the poem that inspired her play’s title. It begins and ends with a question.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
... Or does it explode?
Have a Flashback idea? Share your suggestions with Editor Colleen Kujawa at ckujawa@chicagotribune.com.
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